Dragaera

The Religion Debate

Fri Nov 29 18:14:19 PST 2002

Steven Brust wrote:
> 
> 
> Well, sure.  And then I stop disagreeing with them.  Remember, I'm not
> denying the existence of god; I'm denying that there is a god outside of
> the realm of ideas.  I'm denying a world in which the laws of nature do not
> operate, or can be suspended.   If you want to take some aspect or aspects
> of the material world and label them "God" then I might wonder why you
> bother, but I certainly won't dispute it.
> 

It has been argued -- with a good deal of historical support -- that it
was the Christian model of a God who was both creator and good which
allowed the development of a view of the world as operating according to
stable laws, which was a critical prerequisite for the development of
experimental science.

The Greeks (mainly) lacked an experimantal methodology because they
didn't believe that the world _signified_ anything, and that it was
therefore far more important to think about things apart from the
material world.  This isn't merely an issue in Plato, but also in
Aristotle.

Less developed sets of belief didn't tend to view tbe powers (whatever
they were) as particularly benevolent, and therefore the effects of
nature were seen as capricious -- they might be totally different
tomorrow at a deity's whim.

The philosophical schools of the middle ages, especially after the
rejection of Averroism (the view that there were "two truths" which need
not be in agreement, philosophical truth and revealed truth) supported
the view that the world was ordered and predictable, and that God
wouldn't change it (because he was good), and that matter and the world
was _important_ (because of the doctrine of the incarnation).  They thus
provided the necessary context for attempts to investigate the physical
world in a systematic, experimental manner.  If the nature of the world
as determined by experiment differed from what one thought it would be
based on revelation, then the interpretation of revelation was wrong,
and had to be adjusted accordingly.

In that particular context, suspensions of the laws of nature --
miracles -- were seen precisely as _exceptions_, and very rare
exceptions at that, which meant that they could be excluded from the
areas which one was trying to investigate.  Even if a miracle did occur,
because it _wasn't_ related to cause and effect it would end up showing
up as experimental error (so it wouldn't corrupt one's experimental
findings too much).  (This is why there's a methodological problem with
Hume's argument regarding miracles: if they're already defined as
grossly unlikely, then one can't use their unlikeliness as a way of
deciding against them -- it's a _metabasis eis allo genos_.)

-- 
James Burbidge			jamesandmary.burbidge at sympatico.ca